Publications in Journals

Functional renormalization group (FRG) has become a diverse and powerful tool to derive effective low-energy scattering vertices of interacting many-body systems. Starting from a free expansion point of the action, the flow of the RG parameter Λ allows us to trace the evolution of the effective one- and two-particle vertices towards low energies by taking into account the vertex corrections between all parquet channels in an unbiased fashion. In this work, we generalize the expansion point at which the diagrammatic resummation procedure is initiated from a free UV limit to a cluster product state. We formulate a cluster FRG scheme where the noninteracting building blocks (i.e., decoupled spin clusters) are treated exactly, and the intercluster couplings are addressed via RG. As a benchmark study, we apply our cluster FRG scheme to the spin-12 bilayer Heisenberg model (BHM) on a square lattice where the neighboring sites in the two layers form the individual two-site clusters. Comparing with existing numerical evidence for the BHM, we obtain reasonable findings for the spin susceptibility, the spin-triplet excitation energy, and quasiparticle weight even in coupling regimes close to antiferromagnetic order. The concept of cluster FRG promises applications to a large class of interacting electron systems.

Spin liquids represent exotic types of quantum matter that evade conventional symmetry-breaking order even at zero temperature. Exhaustive classifications of spin liquids have been carried out in several systems, particularly in the presence of full SU(2) spin-rotation symmetry. Real magnetic compounds, however, generically break SU(2) spin symmetry as a result of spin-orbit coupling—which in many materials provides an “order one” effect. We generalize previous works by using the projective symmetry group method to classify Z2 spin liquids on the square lattice when SU(2) spin symmetry is maximally lifted. We find that, counterintuitively, the lifting of spin symmetry actually results in vastly more spin-liquid phases compared to SU(2)-invariant systems. A generic feature of the SU(2)-broken case is that the spinons naturally undergo p+ip pairing; consequently, many of these Z2 spin liquids feature a topologically nontrivial spinon band structure supporting gapless Majorana edge states. We study in detail several spin-liquid phases with varying numbers of gapless edge states and discuss their topological protection. The edge states are often protected by a combination of time reversal and lattice symmetries and hence resemble recently proposed topological crystalline superconductors.